People who are protesting are by nature angry, or at least solemn. They have upraised fists, and homemade signs.

But young Britons haven’t even bothered to come up with a slogan or a decent chant. They are blissfully happy as they destroy other people’s property. They are without guilt.

It can be seen in the images of giddy youths hauling flat-screen televisions out of plundered shops. It can be read in the reports where, as one witness described, a young woman looted so many sweaters from a high-end London store she tottered under their weight. And it can be heard, starkly, in the conversation between a BBC radio reporter and two women in Croydon who were, at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, drinking from a bottle of stolen rosé and talking about their night of adventure.

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The reporter gamely tried to crack through the cognitive dissonance she was hearing. These are local people whose shops are being torched, she said. “Why are you targeting your own people?”

“It’s the rich people,” came the explanation. “It’s the people who have all got businesses. That’s why all this is happening, because of the rich people.”

Tell that to the kid, captured on video, who was sitting on the ground with a bleeding nose when someone came to his aid. He was helped up, then had his backpack emptied.

Tell that to the shop owners whose only asset was their inventory and who have lost it all to self-centred, marauding thugs. If only they had known they were “rich,” they might have taken time to enjoy their vast wealth. Instead of, you know, working.

We have seen scenes of urban destruction on this scale before, but normally when disaster strikes it is the result of, say, a hurricane, not the conscious decision of a group of sentient beings.

So many commentators and analysts are taking a crack at explaining why this happening, but I’d argue that BBC clip says most of it: these are young people having fun.

They have convinced themselves someone else is to blame, even if they identify a different culprit in consecutive breaths, and therefore they are off to pillage, loot and burn. If homes are lost to the fires? Blame the rich. Or the police. They started it all, you see.

In Vancouver, the riots this spring also had the air of people having a few giggles. Put a bunch of highly refreshed youths in the same area and once things start being smashed others will join in. The search for a larger truth was fruitless: there was just a mob mentality and a lot of people with an apparent inability to tell right from wrong.

But where residents of coastal B.C. had a hard time coming up with root causes for the mayhem unleashed after a hockey game — Vancouver being one of the nicer places to live in a country that has done not badly for itself in recent years — there have been plenty of theories proffered for the criminality on display in places like London and Liverpool this week.

Observers have pointed to growing youth unemployment, high rates of school dropouts and illiteracy and even the number of children from broken homes as evidence Britain’s “lost generation” was like a powder keg waiting for a fuse.

These arguments aren’t just coming from those on the political left, either. The Centre for Social Justice, a think-tank founded by Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith, said, “this mayhem also exposes a broken section of British society,” one where the rioters “project anarchy in public because it is what surrounds them at home. Many will have never known stable parenting or fatherhood role models. Such family breakdown and dysfunction has rendered countless young people damaged and directionless.”

Is it the lack of a decent role model, though, that leads someone to torch a warehouse? Does having an absentee father preclude one from realizing stealing an armload of clothing is not something to be giddily celebrated in front of television cameras?

It has been almost 20 years since I could justifiably call myself a youth — and my children rebel mostly by not eating their vegetables — so I can’t claim to know what today’s young adults are thinking. But judged on their actions, the people who decide to smash things, to set them ablaze, are happy to abdicate responsibility. They blame the police, or the rich. Or the happenstance of a hockey game, and the madness of crowds.

It is self-entitlement, in mob form. They carry baseball bats, but not a conscience. That’s where the real fault lies.